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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Hannah BloomfieldORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
In highly renewable power systems the increased weather dependence can result in new resilience challenges, such as renewable energy droughts, or a lack of sufficient renewable generation at times of high demand. The weather conditions responsible for these challenges have been well-studied in the literature. However, in reality multi-day resilience challenges are triggered by complex interactions between high demand, low renewable availability, electricity transmission constraints and storage dynamics. We show these challenges cannot be rigorously understood from an exclusively power systems, or meteorological, perspective. We propose a new method that uses electricity shadow prices --- obtained by a European power system model based on 40 years of reanalysis data --- to identify the most difficult periods driving system investments. Such difficult periods are driven by large-scale weather conditions such as low wind and cold temperature periods of various lengths associated with stationary high pressure over Europe. However, purely meteorological approaches fail to identify which events lead to the largest system stress over the multi-decadal study period due to the influence of subtle transmission bottlenecks and storage issues across multiple regions. These extreme events also do not relate strongly to traditional weather patterns (such as Euro-Atlantic weather regimes or the North Atlantic Oscillation index). We therefore compile a new set of weather patterns to define energy system stress events which include the impacts of electricity storage and large-scale interconnection. Without interdisciplinary studies combining state-of-the-art energy meteorology and modelling, further strive for adequate renewable power systems will be hampered.
Author(s): Grochowicz A, van Greevenbroak K, Bloomfield HC
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Environmental Research Letters
Year: 2024
Volume: 19
Issue: 5
Print publication date: 26/04/2024
Online publication date: 25/03/2024
Acceptance date: 08/03/2024
Date deposited: 26/03/2024
ISSN (electronic): 1748-9326
Publisher: Institute of Physics
URL: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad374a
DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ad374a
Data Access Statement: The code to reproduce the results of the present study, as well as links to the data used, are available at https://github.com/koen-vg/stressful-weather/tree/v0. All code is open source (licensed under GPL v3.0 and MIT), and all data used are open (various licenses)
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